CAISO: Heat Wave in CA, So Called "Renewable Electricity" Matched Gas Electricity for 10 Minutes.

[NNadir]

This is a follow up of my thread of yesterday, about the extreme heat being experienced in California and how so called "renewable energy" is faring on addressing the electricity demand associated with the need for cooling.

That thread is here: Looking at CAISO demand and supply of electricity during extreme California temperatures.

Yesterday I focused on the weather in San Bernadino, where the high temperature yesterday was 102°F (38°C) and mentioned Indio, California, one of California's fastest growing cities, albeit with a relatively small population for California of around 80,000. Today in San Bernardino, the predicted high will be again 102°F (38°C) at 3 pm. Indio is cooling down compared to yesterday, where temperatures of over 120°F (49°C). Today's high will "only" be 118°F (48°C).

Humans cannot survive temperatures much higher than 120°F (49°C) without drinking copious amounts of water. A human trial with 10 young healthy male volunteers, evaluated strategies for survival at lower temperatures (43.0 ± 0.5 °C) than we're seeing in Indio, in a 90 min trial, in the absence of air conditioning:

Intermittent wetting clothing as a cooling strategy for body heat strain alleviation of vulnerable populations during a severe heatwave incident (Song, Wang, Zhang, Journal of Thermal Biology 79 (2019) 33–41).

The subjects, all men in their early 20s dressed in light clothing, all lost about 120 - 130 grams of water to evaporation and produced about 350 grams of sweat in this period.

The introduction to that paper had some fun text about the death toll associated with heat waves, albeit assuredly not in any way a comprehensive accounting:

Heatwaves (i.e., prolonged periods of extremely hot weather) are becoming increasingly frequent and intense in recent years due to global warming and climate change (Li et al., 2015). It is now well established that human mortality and morbidity rates increase significantly during extreme heatwaves (Robine et al., 2008, Knowlton et al., 2009, Shaposhnikov et al., 2014, Guo et al., 2017). In the year of 2003, the deadliest heatwaves in Europe led to over 70,000 deaths (Robine et al., 2008). The California's 2006 heatwave killed at least 140 people and led to 1182 hospitalizations (Knowlton et al., 2009). The 2010 severe heatwave killed 55,736 people in Russia (Shaposhnikov et al., 2014). More recently in 2015, heatwaves in India and Pakistan claimed more than 4500 lives (Murari et al., 2015). Obviously, heatwaves have become a global concern, and they severely threaten human health and safety (Li et al., 2015, Mora et al., 2017).

In extremely hot environments (Tair≥ 40 °C), people like the poor and the homeless in backward areas do not have a chance to access air-conditioning. Hence, they have a high risk of suffering heat stress during prolonged heatwave incidents. In fact, statistical data showed that those populations account for a large proportion of heat-induced death tolls (Åström et al., 2011, Gronlund, 2014, Gubernot et al., 2014). Besides, extreme heatwaves put strains on the electrical power grid and cause power outages in some regions which renders electrically powered cooling devices (e.g., air-conditioning, electric fans and water pumps) useless...

Power outages in these conditions can kill a person.

Of course, people don't often discuss the death toll associated with heat waves. Most people, in my experience, would rather talk about the 2011 Earthquake and Tsunami in Japan in which 20,000 people died from seawater, although the deaths from seawater are in no way as interesting as the possibility that someone some day somewhere may die from radiation that leaked from nuclear reactors destroyed by the Tsunami.

I'm frequently told that nuclear power is "too dangerous," by people who apparently believe that climate change is not "too dangerous." By contrast, I've been hearing for most of my adult life - I'm decidedly not young - that so called "renewable energy" will save the day. It hasn't saved the day and it isn't saving the day, but in these times, we like to substitute faith for facts, and who am I to argue with lies in the age of popular lies, where the lies we tell others and the lies we tell ourselves are celebrated?

California is often presented as a so called "renewable energy" paradise.

We are nearing the summer solstice, and of course, California is a putative solar energy nirvana in particular.

Real time data is available at the CAISO website: CAISO Website.

Since I check this website frequently, and have been doing so as we approach the solstice, we can expect that so called "renewable energy" will be dominated by solar production in the early afternoon. As of this writing, the current peak solar production in the entire State of California is, as of 12:10, PDT, 11,382 MW, the high, so far for the day. In the whole state, wind power is producing a total of 710 MW. The predicted peak power demand at the CAISO site for 6/17/21 is at 18:10 PDT, (6:10 PM) will be 43,048 MW, as the sun is going down, and with it, solar power production. The current demand for energy 12:20 PDT, is 35,599 MW.

People like to cheer for what so called "renewable energy" does at peaks. At no point yesterday, did all the renewable energy facilities in the entire State of California, ever, for even for a few minutes, match the power produced by burning dangerous natural gas, and dumping the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide directly into the planetary atmosphere.

Today however, for a period of about 15 minutes, so called "renewable energy" matched the output of the dangerous natural gas plants in the state in a period between 9:45 and 9:55; at 9:55, all the so called "renewable energy" in the State of California was producing 12,756 MW, exactly equal to what dangerous natural gas was producing.

I'll pause for cheers...



After half a century of wild cheering for so called "renewable energy," it is still - I contend always will be - dependent on access to dangerous natural gas. We. Couldn't. Care. Less.

There is one nuclear plant left in California, Diablo Canyon (2 reactors). It is producing about 2,278 MW of electricity in two small buildings, more than all the wind turbines in California. The reactor came on line 36 years ago, and is functioning fine. It's reliable and predictable. No one has been killed by pollution produced by the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant. I contend that the used nuclear fuel stored there, all of it on site, will be a valuable resource for future generations that will be less stupid than mine has been.

Unfortunately this nuclear plant is about to close because of appeals to ignorance. That will raise the dependency of gas on California. No replacement of this valuable resource, which is at this exact point, producing more energy than all the wind turbines in the entire state, this without turning vast tracts of wilderness into industrial parks, is planned.

The nuclear plant will be replaced by dangerous natural gas. There will be lots of outright lies told to the contrary, but the plant will be replaced by dangerous natural gas.

Dangerous natural gas is not clean; it is not safe, and it releases significant amounts of the important dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide, and leaks for the transport and use of dangerous natural gas releases the second most important climate forcing gas, methane.

Graphics from the CAISO website for power production in California as of 12:15 PDT, 06/17/21:





There is a serious risk of California, particularly Southern California, becoming uninhabitable, particularly with respect to the effect of climate change, to which dangerous natural gas is a contributor, on water supplies. You may think I'm being extreme here, but I don't think so.

We're kidding ourselves if we think we're doing anything to address climate change.

History will not forgive us; nor should it.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

1. Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but wouldn't all that power produced by renewables

Have been produced by dangerous natural gas ... if the renewable sources were not standing and producing?

As I've shared many times, I totally disagree w/shutting down Diablo, in part because my cousin literally spent his entire career there (someone every bit as liberal as me, and who also agrees with us both that shutting it down is ridiculous), but also because generally I think we need more nuclear power, not less in this era of climate change.

That said, what is so BAD about replacing SOME of the dangerous natural gas sourced power with solar & wind?

Is it possible you're letting perfect be the enemy of good here, NNadir?

[NNadir]

2. After a long life, I've decided that there is nothing "good" about so called "renewable energy."

If we require two systems to do what one system can do, and require the mining of vast amounts of metal to link these redundant systems together (as well as to build them)...and expend vast sums of money that could be better utilized elsewhere, I fail to see anything "good" about the situation.

In California they've had to shut power because power lines were causing massive fires. If you think for a minute that there aren't more power lines in California to link all of its unreliable so called "renewable energy" facilities, you're not paying attention.

Every single so called "renewable energy" facility on this planet will need to be replaced within 25 years, with a few minor exceptions.

The babies born today will need to clean up the mess left by these mass intensive systems. They will need to do this under conditions of extreme weather, destroyed water reserves, the best ores depleted and the tailings of them leaking toxic substances and elements, and will be dealing with a world in which many precious wildernesses have been rendered into rotting industrial parks with the greasy remains of wind turbines.

I have convinced myself that the thermal efficiency of nuclear plants can be raised from the current 33% (Rankine) systems to combined cycle/carbon dioxide hydrogenation facilities. A crude calculation suggests that we can at least double the thermal efficiency, perhaps do even better. Under these conditions, a nuclear plant roughly the size of Diablo Canyon can produce grid power of approximately 4500 MW, this while also using waste heat for desalination, waste recovery, etc.

Currently, California energy demand peaks are on the order of 45,000 MW, on a bad day, more often in the mid 30,000 MW range. This means roughly 10 nuclear plants with a land footprint equivalent to Diablo Canyon, perhaps a little more to exploit heat network equipment to raise the exergy. If the plants operate continuously at full power, they would all represent "spinning reserve" that could be put to use, for example recycling metals in a variant of the FFC Cambridge process, and or producing (thermally) liquid fuels for those types of devices we can't really eliminate, buses, delivery trucks, farm tractors, ambulances, etc.

Alternatively they could be utilized to recover carbon dioxide from seawater.

I don't think this is widely discussed, but the reduction of carbon dioxide requires, by the laws of thermodynamics, that all of the energy released by dumping it into the environment, plus considerable energy associated with entropy must be produced to do this. This is a daunting task. At the end of my life I believe it just might be - might be - feasible, but if so, barely so. As this is the case, it behooves us to stop dicking around with the future of humanity.

Given that there is one, and only one, source that can produce this much energy, nuclear energy, squandering resources on anything else is wasteful, unsustainable, and, in my view, immoral.

[jeffreyi]

3. I think I am won over.

Vast acreages of open land in Nevada and elsewhere are in the process of being eaten by current and proposed solar industrial development. This current drought and heat wave will make it happen all the faster. There is absolutely nothing "green" about this. Only tragedy. Solar needs to be on rooftops, parking lots, dead shopping malls, etc., where there is already development and infrastructure.

[hunter]

4. I look at it this way -- each wind turbine represents an equal or greater commitment to natural gas.

If a brand new wind turbine is expected to last thirty years then that's a thirty year commitment to the natural gas power plants "backing it up."

Natural gas is the bullet. Sure, it's "better" to get hit by one bullet rather than two, but it's best not to get shot at.

If we made some kind of commitment to nuclear power, which I think we will, then we wouldn't need any wind turbines or natural gas power plants.

I think that would be a good thing.

Yes, I can do the math and argue about the futility of wind power using a spreadsheet, but I also find wind turbines offensive to my aesthetic sense.

They are ugly.

Seeing wind turbines on hillsides, on farmland, and out at sea does not make me happy. I don't see them as any symbol of progress. Mostly they make me sad and a little angry.